proton-lead collisions

The LHC has just delivered the first pPb (proton-lead) collisions with stable beams of 2013 and CMS is happily running with all sub-detectors on. We are also having common triggers with TOTEM and everything is behaving very well.

The new year brings a new type of collision at the LHC: the accelerator will smash protons and lead nuclei together, allowing CMS and the other LHC experiments to study the cold nuclear matter we expect these collisions to produce.

CMS has published its first paper on proton-lead (pPb) collisions, describing the observation of a phenomenon that was previously seen first in nucleus-nucleus collisions but also detected by CMS in proton-proton (pp) collisions.